student center.
So it came about that resisting authority became a normal part of daily life in Le Chambon. The students at the private school L’École Nouvelle Cévenole, which Trocmé and Theis had founded, refused to salute the flag or hang the picture of Pétain, the Vichy leader, in every classroom. On a national holiday, Trocmé’s parish ignored Pétain’s order to ring the church bells at noon. They would ring the bells only for God. A tight network also provided the refugees with false identification cards that allowed them to pass as non-Jewish. But though it was truly resistance, the fighters in this nonviolent underground were not fueled by anger or hatred. Some maintained connections with partisan fighters in the area, while throughout the rescue effort anonymous messages and phone calls trickled in at just the right time warning of the possibility of raids by the Vichy police. Because of the risk of discovery, town residents never talked in public about their deeds.
Trocmé, at considerable personal risk, was at the forefront of much of the village’s activity. On June 22, 1940, France surrendered to the Nazis and agreed to arrest and deport to Germany any refugees Hitler’s government might demand. The next day, during a Sunday service, Trocmé and Theis both preached about resistance.
Tremendous pressure will be put on us to submit passively to a totalitarian ideology. If they do not succeed in subjugating our souls, at least they will want to subjugate our bodies. The duty of Christians is to use the weapons of the Spirit to oppose the violence that they will try to put on our consciences. We appeal to all our brothers in Christ to refuse to cooperate with this violence…
Loving, forgiving, and doing good to our adversaries is our duty. Yet we must do this without giving up, and without being cowardly. We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.2
Their sermon, if daring, was also timely. The Vichy government lost no time in implementing the Nuremberg laws and immediately began arrests. Jews and other refugees were zealously herded into internment camps. But Trocmé, true to his preaching, was not about to admit defeat. With the approval of his church council, and at the request of the American Friends Service Committee, he began to search for ways to provide refuge in Le Chambon for the children rescued from the camps – a dangerous and illegal undertaking. There the recently founded École Nouvelle Cévenole, as well as the public school, stood ready to assimilate them. He also urged his congregation to continue to shelter fugitives of “the people of the Bible,” and encouraged them to stay firm.
In the summer of 1942, Minister Georges Lamirand, head of the Vichy government’s youth organization, showed up in Le Chambon and delivered a speech on the “New Social Order.” The speech over, he was immediately handed a letter by the local youth, protesting the recent roundup of nearly 13,000 Jews in Paris. They informed him in unequivocal terms that they intended to protect persecuted people whenever and however they could. Trocmé was clearly the source of this defiance, and soon after was warned of the dire consequences facing him if he did not turn in the names of all hidden Jews. Trocmé refused, saying, “We do not know what a Jew is; we only know people.” For three weeks the police scoured the village and its surrounding areas, but the rescue network was so tight that they came up with only two arrests.
In August, under surveillance and with rumors circulating that he might soon be arrested, Trocmé preached to an overflowing church on Deuteronomy 19, concerning the entitlement of the persecuted to shelter, “so that innocent blood will not be shed.” His own response was clear: “These people came here for help and for shelter. I am their shepherd. A shepherd does not forsake his flock.”
Eventually, though, Trocmé’s activities were brought to a halt. In February of 1943 he and Theis, his co-pastor, as well as the director of Le Chambon’s public school, were arrested and shipped to a French internment camp. Surprisingly, after four weeks of imprisonment all three men were freed, even though they refused to sign a declaration of obedience. However, Trocmé and Theis were warned that their lives were in danger, so the two men went into hiding for the next ten months but secretly stayed in contact with rescue efforts. Four months after their arrest, the German police finally raided Les Roches, the center for young adult refugees near Le Chambon. This hit close to home for Trocmé; his cousin Daniel, director of Les Roches, was arrested along with seventeen students. He was later murdered by the Nazis at Maidanek, just weeks before the concentration camp was liberated.
The great war finally played itself out. The fighting ended, and the need for secrecy passed. The people of Le Chambon and of the surrounding plateau had kept thousands of innocent lives from harm right to the end, despite repression and intimidation. Ultimately, the rescue network provided a haven or safe passage for an estimated 2,500 refugees, with a large percentage being Jews and children.3 And everything took place right under the noses of the Vichy police and, later, of the Gestapo themselves.
Missionary of Nonviolence
Trocmé, in the words of Marlin Miller, who helped translate this book, “was one of the rare Christian pacifists who refused to choose between impassioned action and intellectual clarity.” His efforts, which sprang from his clarity of purpose, would be devoted to peace and reconciliation for the remainder of his life. World War II over, Trocmé served from 1948 to 1960 as European secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, traveling and lecturing all over the world. His House of Reconciliation, an international peace center in Versailles, positioned him as one of the links in a chain that united such leaders of nonviolence as Martin Luther King, Jr., Toyohiko Kagawa, and Gandhi.
Driven by his faith, Trocmé and his wife, Magda, set out in 1956 to study the conflict in war-torn Algeria. For a short while there they volunteered their personal time in overcoming illiteracy. They also learned more about the plight of French resisters who refused to serve in the French army. This concerned Trocmé tremendously. He thus worked with the Mennonites to help found Eirene in Morocco, which has now become a worldwide service program for conscientious objectors and development workers.
In 1960, for what was to be the final decade of his life, Trocmé returned to pastoral ministry. Because of his absolute pacifist stand it was difficult for him to find a French church to lead. Finally, he was invited to become pastor of a large Reformed church in Geneva, Switzerland. Despite the bourgeois lives of his congregants, he motivated them to organize and support technical development work in northern Algeria. Shortly before his death, Yad Vashem awarded him and his wife, along with others in Le Chambon, the prestigious “Righteous Among the Nations” medal for the part they played in the rescue efforts.
Trocmé’s convictions and ideas grew out of his activities as a peacemaker. His writings were forged not in theoretical musings, but in the fiery events that had been his baptism into the world of nonviolent revolution.
Trocmé wrote much and often but only managed to publish two books. His first book, The Politics of Repentance (1953), proposed a strategy for peacemaking in situations of conflict. Jesus and the Nonviolent Revolution (1961, French edition), is a systematic treatment of Christian nonviolence and the more influential of the two books.
When this book first appeared it broke the clutches of “Christian realism,” spearheaded by Reinhold Niebuhr, which was so dominant at the time. Trocmé offers a truly Christ-centered social ethic, one to be taken seriously not just by individuals but by the church. He understands from personal experience that Christ’s redemptive work extends far beyond the individual to encompass society and nations. His understanding of discipleship is revolutionary without succumbing to political ideology or sheer activism.4
There is nothing fancy about Trocmé’s approach. With prophetic intuition rather than weighty analysis, he renders interpretations that are both subtle and provocative. His core argument is simple: Jesus inaugurated the kingdom of God based on the Jubilee principles
